**Disclaimer: I received an eARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this opportunity.
Out of Air by Rachel Reiss is a young adult horror novel centralized on the ideas of deep sea diving and treasure hunting, which is honestly very terrifying to me. The book is about a young girl named Phibs who gets into trouble with her friends after finding a secret diving spot. It is set to be published on May 13th, 2025. I rated it 4 stars on Goodreads.
Here’s the summary from Goodreads:
The deeper you go, the darker you fall.
Phoebe “Phibs” Ray is never more at home than when she’s underwater. On a dive six months ago, she and her four closest friends discovered a handful of ancient gold coins, rocketing them into social media fame. Now, their final summer together after high school, they’re taking one last trip to a distant Australian island to do what they love most – scuba dive.
While diving a local reef, Phibs discovers a spectacular underwater sea cave, rumored to be a lost cave with a buried treasure. But when Phibs and her best friend Gabe surface from the cave, they notice that they’re undergoing strange changes. Oozing gashes that don’t heal. Haunting whispers in their heads… Something has latched onto them, lurking beneath their skin, transforming them from the inside out.
When treasure hunters arrive, desperate to find the location of the cave and hold Phibs’ group for ransom, she’ll do anything to keep her friends safe. In the process she learns that, of all the dreadful creatures of the sea, she might be the most terrifying of them all.
Something to know about me is that I’m not a big swimmer, and I am also not very confident in the water, so when it comes to reading stories about diving and swimming, I’m already a little scared even if they aren’t a horror novel like this one. So this premise already had me a little scared, but I’m not going to lie, I don’t think that I actually read the blurb too closely so I didn’t fully expect the supernatural elements of this one.
Phibs was a really interesting character. Her trying to fit in with her friends was a really interesting premise to me. I liked how diving had brought them together and given them an excuse to be friends when they might not have normally. I also found her backstory interesting, and how she felt that she had to take care of her grandmother, who was quite ill, at the expense of her own future. She seemed like she was a really good person, which I appreciated.
The writing style was engaging. I liked the way we switched between the past and the present to understand further how the characters came to be in the situation they were. There were a lot of good moments of tension that had nothing to do with the supernatural, and so I found that quite engaging. The author did a great job at balancing those elements.
The supernatural elements were a little bit more hard to follow, but I did find them really intriguing nonetheless. I liked the whole secret spot aspect. It was interesting that things seemed to affect Gabe a fair bit faster than they affected Phibs. I think I would have liked some more development of that part, but it was still a really interesting twist to the story.
On the whole, this was a really engaging story. If you like horror stories with supernatural elements, you should definitely check this one out.
Leave a Reply